The staffer's dilemma

Between the lines of Danny Kedem’s decision it was hard not to read the simple message: To hell with this. With Anthony Weiner’s mayoral bid engulfed in tawdry new sexting allegations, the 31-year-old operative counted himself out and resigned as Weiner’s campaign manager.

Here’s one way to look at Kedem’s choice: Good for him. Just because Weiner has the brass to fight on in a campaign that is losing credibility by the hour, that doesn’t mean his demoralized aides have to surrender their own dignity or serve as enablers for the boss’s embarrassing behavior.

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Here’s another way to look at the same decision: Who does Kedem think he is? When you sign up for a campaign, says this line of thinking, you are signing up for both the good days and the bad. A resignation amounts to a battlefield desertion — this one quickly leaked to The New York Times on Saturday.

Weiner’s campaign, while increasingly a kind of national punch line, highlights what for political operatives and staff hands is a serious issue: The often exquisite trade-off between conflicting values in public life. On one hand there are the demands of conscience and the natural desire to protect one’s own reputation from being soiled by a politician’s misdeeds. On the other are the cardinal virtues of loyalty and not going wobbly in a fight.

The staffer’s dilemma can be produced by all manner of ethical, legal and even policy-related controversies, not just sex scandals. But the loyalty vs. self-interest question seems to be coming up more often — and more publicly — these days, as changing media standards regularly put politicians’ personal behavior on very public display. In addition, there is the growing trend of political operatives who cultivate media reputations for themselves that are nearly as prominent as the candidates they work for.

Behind almost any major political fallout in recent memory, you can trace a secondary story of staffers who had to decide whether to flee or fight. President Bill Clinton’s staff largely remained loyal during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. When Gov. David Paterson’s administration came under investigation, his communications director, Peter Kauffmann, said he could not “in good conscience continue.” A Mark Sanford aide quit after the governor admitted to an affair, then returned to work on his congressional campaign (which he won). Sarah Palin’s advisers wrestled with what to do about their growing suspicions that she was simply not qualified to be on a major-party ticket. Just last month, San Diego Mayor Bob Filner, accused of sexually harassing women, lost his chief of staff.

For Kedem’s part, in New York political circles the word is that he had indicated to colleagues that he felt misled by Weiner, who had left the impression that the behavior in question had not continued after his resignation from Congress. Kedem declined to comment.

The degree to which staffers’ plights even matter in the shadows of the candidates themselves has come up for debate in the wake of Weiner’s latest revelations. After the publication of his spokeswoman Barbara Morgan’s profane criticism of an intern, for which Morgan apologized, a Jezebel headline this week read, “Reminder: Worst Person in Weiner Scandal Is Still Anthony Weiner.” By turn, The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza mused on Twitter that the spokeswoman’s “viciously & publicly attacking an intern” seemed worse than Weiner’s “lying about some racy e-banter,” adding he was “probably in [the] minority” with that view.

Whatever bearing these episodes have on the substantive issues of the campaign, they present real and challenging choices for the staffers who must navigate them once their bosses set the crisis in motion. There is no consensus on whether loyalty or conscience should always dominate, and most operatives who spoke for this story said it depends on the case.

“Caught in a tough predicament as a staff person, it’s best to remember, ‘This ain’t about you,’” former Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry said in an email. “Your job is to represent your principal as best and professionally as you can, just like a lawyer would. Even a president in a tight spot personally deserves professional help on the legal and public relations front.”

But there is a point when no one could begrudge even the most committed aides if they decided to bolt, many said. “On the personal side, the rule is ‘to thine own self be true,’” McCurry said. “So don’t represent what you cannot stomach.”